


The Space Garden

by Edonohana



Category: The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Alternate Universe - Space, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Healing, Space Stations, Terraforming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:47:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28267875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: When Meri La Nix was sent from the Mars colony to live with her aunt at Missiles Wait Manor, nobody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. But some of them thought it.
Comments: 32
Kudos: 109
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Space Garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fresne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/gifts).



When Meri La Nix was sent from the Mars colony to live with her aunt at Missiles Wait Manor, nobody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. But some of them thought it. Her skin was ashy, her hair was dry and damaged, and her lips were always twisted into a scowl or curled as if she was about to lunge at your throat. 

The shuttle crew who transported her to York Station tried to comfort her, for all of them knew that both her parents had died in a decompression accident and the captain additionally knew that Meri had barely known them and had been raised in a creche dome. But she didn’t seem sad or scared. She was sour and rude and sulky, and even the astrogator, who had lost his own mother in the same accident and thought he understood, couldn’t bring himself to like her. 

They liked her even less after she managed to punch a hole in a no-fail juice pouch and sent sticky droplets flying everywhere. It was impossible to do that by accident and difficult to do it on purpose, but somehow she managed, and the crew would be scrubbing off stray juice spots for weeks to come. Tragedy or not, child or not, they were glad to see the last of her. 

The only part of the shuttle trip that Meri had enjoyed was when she’d figured out how to puncture the juice pouch. The crew then stopped fussing over her and devoted themselves to catching a million tiny juice drops. Zero-g hadn’t made her sick, as they’d given her an injector for that, but she hadn’t enjoyed it either. She’d been secured to her seat with locking straps and not given the controls, so all she experienced was an unsettling feeling that her body was trying to drift away against her will. 

The creche dome on Mars, with its sleek metal and bright plastics, was all she’d ever known, and she hadn’t cared for it. Most of the other children were only there for part of each day and returned to their parents or guardians once their work shift was done. It was a policy not to give people caring for children jobs that required that they be gone for days, let alone months, unless they specifically volunteered for them. Meri’s parents had volunteered. 

Meri understood perfectly well that someone might obtain something they didn’t really want and then hang on to it, refusing to let anyone else have it. She did that with toys, though she didn’t understand why. It made the other children and the carers dislike her, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

She hadn’t much cared when her parents had died, as she’d barely known them. She didn’t much care about leaving Mars, for she hadn’t liked it. Nor did she much care about where she was going. In the rush to find her relatives and arrange for her transportation, everyone had thought someone else had told her about York Station. No one had, so Meri knew nothing beyond what she’d been taught in the creche: it was a space station built up from Vesta, an asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, it had lower gravity than Mars, like Mars it was in the process of being terraformed, it traded stuff she’d forgotten, it had industries she’d forgotten, and it had… some kind of economy. 

She didn’t expect to like it, and was not surprised when her first glimpse was of a bunch of ugly, battered vehicles zooming around a bunch of ugly, battered, multi-level buildings, with an immense dome protecting it all. 

Meri stood on the shuttle dock, clutching a bag that contained some clothes and tooth pills and things like that. The only thing in it she cared about was her reader, and she didn’t want to take it out in case she dropped it and it floated away, even though she knew the gravity wasn’t _that_ low. But it was low enough to make her feel uneasy.

A tall, lanky woman strode up to her. “Meri? Meri La Nix?”

Her accent was strange, and it took a moment for Meri to understand her own name. 

“I’m Meri,” she said. “Are you my aunt?”

The tall woman laughed. “No, I be Martta Sower. I work for Archana Kurien.”

“Who?”

“Thy aunt, girl. Don’t tha ken her name?”

“Ken?” Meri repeated blankly. 

“Know,” Martta said. “Don’t tha know her name?”

Meri hadn’t known it. No one had remembered to tell her. She felt ashamed of her ignorance, and of the difficulty she was having understanding Martta, and that made her angry. “Nobody tells me anything! And why can’t you talk like a normal person? I can’t understand a word you’re saying!”

Martta gave her a long look, which gave Meri a chance to look her over in return. Martta had dark brown skin with a healthy glow, big brown eyes, and a hairstyle Meri had never seen on Mars, where everyone needs to get into space suits at least twice a month for the decompression drills. It was a great puff of black that framed her face and surrounded her head, and would have made it difficult to quickly put on and seal a helmet. 

Martta also had long, spidery fingers and prominent, sharp bones. Meri thought she looked like a witch in a fairytale, the kind that lures children into airlocks with promises of treats and then spaces them.

“I can talk like a Martian,” said Martta, and while she still had an accent, she was suddenly much easier to understand. “But if you’re going to be living on York Station, you should learn the Yorkson cant—the York Station way of talking. Come on. I’ll tell you about your aunt on the rail.”

They boarded the rail. Martta led her to a mostly-empty car, threading her way through the crowds. About half of the passengers looked like Martta, tall and thin, with long fingers and chiseled bones. Martta, catching Meri’s stares, said, “The folk with the true Yorkson look are three-born or four-born—third or fourth generation to be born on York Station. You’ll never look like that, nor your children. But their children might.”

Meri made a face at the idea of having children. Martta laughed and gestured for her to sit by the window. “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“No!” Meri snapped. She’d been fed some kind of disgusting squeeze glop on the shuttle.

Martta shrugged, slipping back into Yorkson cant. “Tha ken Archana Kerien be not thy gene-aunt? It be her wife tha’s related to, tha’s mama’s sister Lilit.” At Meri’s blank look, Martta said, “Tha don’t ken Lilit either?”

“I guess I will once I meet her.” 

“That tha won’t,” replied Martta. “Lilit died when tha were a babe.”

“She died?” It made Meri sad, though she couldn’t say why. She’d never even heard of Lilit before, but only liked her name.

“Aye, died young. I barely remember her—I be but a small-small thing myself.”

Meri hadn’t realized the tall witch-woman was so young. She’d thought Martta old enough to be her mother, but now she could see that she was really more like an older sister. 

“After Lilit died, Dr. Kerien be never the same,” Martta went on. “She do nothing but work, work, work—she be a very important scientist, tha ken—and rarely come home to Missiles Wait. She be gone now, working on Ganymede. Nobody ken when she come back.”

This news didn’t disturb Meri, for she was used to being unwanted and unvisited. She’d never known when her parents would come back, either. “That’s a weird name. Missiles Wait, I mean.”

“It be intended as our defense hub,” said Martta. “Where we would keep our missiles, tha ken. But terraforming and self-sufficiency kept getting prioritized over defense, and there be no wars or attacks, so it waited for missiles that never came. It be only for terraforming and agriculture now.”

While they were talking, Meri watched the views flying by her window, but couldn’t pay full attention to them as she had to concentrate to understand the Yorkson cant. At first they were all the same anyway: ugly buildings, ugly streets. But as they got farther from the dock, they became interspersed with little patches of green, then bigger patches. By the time the rail stopped and Martta stood up, it had become green interspersed with buildings. 

Meri followed her out of the rail and toward the hovercar dock. It was very different here than it had been at the shuttle dock. The dome was still overhead, of course, but the buildings stood among a great many tall, slim, green pillars with regularly spaced green-brown joints… 

With a start, Meri realized that the pillars were actually plants. They had leaves up at the tops, and they grew out of dirt. There was more green stuff growing on the dirt beside them, small plants with little strands of green like thick hairs.

“What are they?” Meri asked.

“Bamboo,” said Martta. 

“And the hairy stuff?”

“Moss. Tha’s seen plants on Mars, in the greenhouses?” 

Meri nodded. 

“Does tha ken what we grow them for?”

“Of course! They’re one of the five pillars of terraforming.” When Martta didn’t demand that she recite all five, Meri went on, “They take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. They draw toxic chemicals from the soil. Some of them fix nitrogen. And you can eat some of them. Not the ones you’re using to suck up the toxic chemicals, of course.”

“Aye, very good. The bamboo forests give Yorkson oxygen. Tha can eat them too. Tha’rt hungry?”

“Not enough to eat one of those things,” snapped Meri. 

Martta smiled. “Tha’ll feel different when tha sees a nice plate of bamboo in front of thee, hot and spiced and steaming.”

Meri doubted that very much. “And what’s that noise?” 

It was a deep hum, not loud but pervasive. Meri had thought it was coming from the station, but it didn’t get softer as they walked away.

“That be the engines for the water and the lights,” said Martta. “Tha can hear them everywhere at Missiles Wait. Sometimes louder, sometimes softer, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Like a song.” 

Meri did not think it was anything like a song. She climbed into a battered old hovercar, scowling. Martta expertly piloted it around the stands of bamboo until she came to a large building wedged right into the middle of more bamboo. Like everything on York Station, apparently, it too was old and battered. 

“This be Missiles Wait Manor.” Martta led her inside. Inside it was dark and chilly, divided into many small rooms. It was as unlike the brightly lit, brightly colored, temperature-controlled, wide open creche as one could imagine, or the clean gleaming metal and plastic of anywhere on Mars, for that matter.

Martta took her to yet another cold dark room, turned on the lights, adjusted the temperature, and asked her if she wanted a nightlight. 

“No!” Meri snapped. “I’m not a baby!”

Martta shrugged and left, turning off the lights as she went out. Meri lay in a bed that was too big, in a room that was still too cold and was pitch black except for the glowing guidance strips on the floor, listening to the growl of the engines. It sounded like a fairytale animal big enough to eat her. 

Its pitch changed, and then it sounded like something was going wrong and decompression would start at any moment. Martta hadn’t shown her where the spacesuits were. Meri sat up in a panic, then remembered that York Station used self-sealing mini-domes rather than individual spacesuits in case of decompression. That didn’t seem very safe.

Meri began to cry. She wept and wept until she wore herself out. Just as she was drifting off, she thought she heard someone else crying. But while she was still dreamily trying to figure out if it was just her own sobs echoing in her ears, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, the room was brighter and warmer, and the ever-present engine hum was softer. Martta was inside, tuning the temperature controls. She greeted Meri and adjusted a window panel, making it transparent and giving her a good view of the bamboo outside.

“Ugh,” Meri muttered. 

After she got dressed, Martta took her to a room where she warmed several packages and served Meri a plateful of white balls with a bowl of lumpy brown stuff. 

Proudly, she pointed to the brown stuff and said, “Vat pork, bamboo shoots, cassava leaves, ginger, and garlic.” Indicating the white balls, she said, “Pounded cassava root. And all of it grown right here in Missiles Wait! Except for the vat pork. Go on. Dip the ball in the stew.”

Meri would have liked to refuse, but she was too hungry. She dipped a ball in the stew and took a bite. It was so different from anything she’d ever eaten before that she couldn’t even tell if she liked it or not. Meri didn’t know why, but that made her want to cry. She took a few more bites, then pushed the plate away.

“Don’t tha like it?”

“I hate it!” Meri exploded. “I hate it here! It’s cold and noisy and there’s no spacesuits and the bamboo is too tall and the food is weird and everything’s dirty and old!”

“I love it here,” said Martta calmly.

That was so unexpected that it pulled Meri back from the brink. “Why?”

“It be so alive,” said Martta. “The bamboo be beautiful, the air be smelling green, and there be birds and insects and reptiles and amphibians and even small-small mammals. My brother Dikkon, he be friends with them.”

Meri had seen insects and birds and mice before, living in their carefully maintained terrariums and aviaries. She knew animals lived wild on Earth, and she’d always been fascinated by the idea of them living in the same space with you. But she’d never considered being friends with them. “Friends?”

“Oh aye. Tha’ll see.” She stood up, scraping Meri’s leftovers into the recycler and repackaging the rest, then fastened a bracelet around her wrist. “Well, tha may run along and play anywhere tha like, so long as it doesn’t have a keep-out sign. Push the button if tha gets lost, and the bracelet will show tha how to get back.”

“I’m not a baby. I know how bracelets work,” Meri snapped, then realized what Martta was implying. “I can just… go wherever I like?”

“Aye.”

“But what do I _do?_ ”

Martta stared at her. “Why, whatever tha likes! Explore! Play! Have fun!”

“By myself?”

“Aye. That’s how Dikkon made friends with the animals. They won’t come if there’s a crowd.” 

The next thing Meri knew, Martta had stuffed her into a coat and was walking her outside, right into the bamboo. 

“There’s gardens that way, if tha doesn’t want to go far,” said Martta, pointing to a gate. “Tha can look at all the vegetables tha doesn’t like to eat. But don’t… Well, never mind. Tha won’t find it, anyway.”

“What?” Meri demanded. “What won’t I find?”

“There be an abandoned garden,” said Martta. For the first time, her voice was hesitant. “Dr. Kerien locked it up when thy aunt died. It be Lilit’s garden, tha sees. No one’s been inside it for ten years. It be forbidden.” 

Then, briskly, Martta said, “I have work to do. Tha can call me on thy bracelet if tha needs me. I’ll call tha in for lunch.”

With that, she vanished back into the house, leaving Meri outside with the tall, tall jointed green pillars of bamboo. Cautiously, she touched one. It was very smooth, except for the jointed part, which was rough. It was hard to believe she was standing right there, touching such a huge living thing, in a the midst of so many more. 

She knelt down and felt the green threadlike moss on the ground. It was rough and woolly, and gave off a distinct scent—no, that was the scent of the earth itself. Meri remembered sniffing a pinch from a greenhouse. It must have taken the Yorksons forever to bring so much of it here. 

Uncertain how she was supposed to play without toys, she walked instead, heading for the gardens. She wasn’t particularly excited to see the gloppy green stuff from the stew, but Martta’s mention of the locked garden intrigued her. What might have happened inside in ten years? Would anything still be growing there?

“Who cares,” she muttered. “More bamboo and vegetables. Thrilling!”

But it had been her aunt Lilit’s garden, and her aunt Archana had locked it up. Would she have done that if it had been exactly the same as everything that wasn’t locked up?

Still turning this over in her mind, Meri reached the vegetable gardens. The artificial sun had been gradually brightening, and shone hot and yellow on them. The dirt was darker than around the bamboo, black rather than brown, and a bunch of small plants grew from it. The scent of earth was stronger here, along with many more smells, some pleasant, some not. 

Small flying insects buzzed and zipped and fluttered and floated around. She wished they’d hold still so she could get a better look at them. The fluttering ones were especially pretty, with delicate patterned wings bigger than her outspread hands. Some had black bodies and bright pink wings laced with black, some were orange and black, some a pure bright blue, and one type was splashed with every color, as if someone had dumped twenty tiny buckets of paint over it. Meri was enchanted.

People were working on the gardens, some with the “true Yorkson look” and some not, but all speaking with the Yorkson cant. She scowled when they glanced up at her, so they went back to work. But a few of them insisted on telling her what they were doing and what things were: “These here be tomatoes, it’s them as smell so sweet,” and “I be adjusting the irrigation, the rosemary be getting too much water” and “I be programming the brightness for ‘full sun.’” Whatever that meant.

“Where’s the locked garden?” Meri asked.

The gardeners (who were also plant geneticists and field botanists and biotechnologists) had been chattering away, but her question struck them silent. 

“That be forbidden,” one said at last.

“I’m not going inside,” Meri said impatiently. “I couldn’t anyway. I’m just curious.”

“Tha can’t see inside,” another said. “Anyway, it be long dead by now.” 

“But where is it?”

They looked at each other, then turned back to her and shrugged like they had no idea. Clearly, nobody wanted her to so much as lay eyes on it, which made her want to get in. But first, she had to find it. 

It took Meri ten days to find the locked garden. In that time, she walked more than she had in her life, exploring the bamboo forests and the gardens. Though she didn’t intend to be a student, she learned nonetheless. 

From the gardeners, she learned that the fluttering insects were butterflies and shiny ones were beetles and the furry buzzing ones were bees and the floating ones were Yorkson floaters, and all of them pollinated the plants. From Martta, she learned how to moisturize her skin and condition her hair, and that she should always protect it by using a special pillowcase. And from the forest and gardens themselves, she learned the scents of plants and the calls of birds and the feel of earth underfoot. 

Her explorations gave her an appetite, and she was soon polishing her plates of fufu and stew and vegetables, though she refused to eat the local delicacy of bird eggs. Martta had unwisely told her where they came out.

Meri didn’t see any amphibians or mammals, but she did spot a single reptile, a slim striped snake that slithered away almost as soon as she saw it. She didn’t tell anyone, even though she wondered what kind it was—she was learning that there were kinds of animals. Meri was growing to like knowing things, but she liked secrets more.

Some of the gardens had walls to prevent stray seeds from escaping or getting inside. Meri was sure she’d seen them all several times over until the day she walked so far that she was about to use her bracelet to find her way home, when a flash of red caught her attention.

It was a plump bird with a red breast. A robin, hovering in the way that birds could do in Yorkson’s low gravity. It cocked its head, regarding her with bright black eyes, then flew between two bamboo stalks and perched atop a wall. 

The wall was green-brown like the bamboo. If not for the robin, Meri wouldn’t have spotted it. She walked up and circled it until she found a door. She pushed, but it was locked. The garden might be abandoned but the lock was still active, the light over its sensor glowing red. Meri wanted to cry again. She’d found it, but she’d never be able to get in. Knowing it was hopeless, she put her hand over the sensor.

There was a painless sucking sensation at one fingertip that made her jerk her hand back before she realized that it wasn’t a handprint lock, but a DNA lock; it had taken a drop of her blood. 

“Even more hopeless,” she muttered.

The door swung open.

Meri had no idea why it had accepted her—the lock couldn’t possibly have been keyed to her—but she didn’t care. She stepped into the secret garden.

Inside, the walls hushed the sound of the engines, making it a soft, rhythmic whisper. Plants were everywhere, climbing up the walls and carpeting the ground and dangling down in curtains. A weathered stone bench was in one corner, and a dry fountain in the center.

It was beautiful because the shapes of the plants and the patterns in which they’d been laid out were lovely. But it was melancholy too, for everything had spilled from the patterns and then died for lack of care. Few insects buzzed and fluttered, and no bird sang. The earth was black and everything else was brown or white or dingy. The leaves were dry and brittle as Meri’s hair had been before Martta had taught her how to care for it.

The garden was dead. It had to be. Meri had watched the gardeners enough to know that plants needed a lot of care. She wandered through the garden, following the winding paths and listening to the whispering engines, wondering what it would be like if it was alive. All green and brown, she supposed. A few little yellow or white flowers, like tomatoes and strawberries had. Some red or purple fruits. Insects would give it even more color. Meri could see it in her mind’s eye, and it gave her a tugging feeling in her chest.

She sat down at the base of the fountain, pushing her fingers into the earth. It was soft and crumbly, slightly moist. The garden’s watering system had been offline for ten years, but the bamboo forest around it was irrigated regularly. Meri supposed some water seeped through. The gardeners would say it was good earth, and it was as moist as some actively maintained gardens, yet nothing grew…

A bit of color caught her eye. Meri leaned over and saw some green shoots poking through the earth. She didn’t know what they were, but that didn’t matter; what was important was that they were alive. 

She jumped up, ran to the wall, and searched for the control panel. She was careful where she placed her feet when she walked, in case there were more shoots, and indeed she spotted more. The control panel was half-buried in a mass of tough purplish vines, but Meri pried them apart and put her hand on the security panel. It sampled her blood, then lit up. 

Meri scowled at it. She knew plants needed sunlight and water, in different amounts depending on the plant, but she had no idea how much those few green shoots needed. Luckily for her, there was a setting headed “standard.” She turned it on, then yelped as a spray of cold water hit her right in the face.

Laughing, she ducked and backed away, watching as lights came on and water sprayed and misted, flowed and seeped up. The fountain, which was shaped like three leaping fish in a basin, began to flow again with a rippling sound. The robin floated down, landed at the rim, and drank.

Meri wondered if she should turn off the fountain, lest its noise reveal what she had done, then remembered how soft the engines were inside these walls. She doubted that anyone would see or hear anything at all outside those muffling walls. The garden seemed designed to be a private place.

She knelt by the shoots, trying to remember what she’d seen the gardeners do for tender young plants. They removed dead leaves and predator insects, and sometimes also unwanted plants. There was a particular plant, brown scourge, which they called “invasive” and which they were forever pulling up, saying it was inedible and choked out other plants. Once Meri started looking for its brown trefoil leaves, she found sprigs of it everywhere. She began pulling it up, by the roots like they did.

She was startled when the lights began to dim. If they were on the same timer as everything else, then she’d been in the garden a long time. She scooped up the pile of brown scourge that she’d uprooted, dumped it in the recycler, and inspected her work. She’d cleared a good-sized area around the fountain, and the green shoots looked much happier now that they’d gotten some water and sunlight and nothing was trying to strangle them.

Meri left the garden and closed the door behind her. It clicked as it auto-locked. She hurried back to the house, thinking that she’d work on the area around the control panel the next day. 

That night she ate all her dinner and asked for seconds. Martta spooned out more vat-meat and greens (crisp bok choy tonight; Meri knew exactly where it grew) and said, “Have tha been running and playing in the bamboo, Meri?”

“I’m not a baby,” Meri said, but she wasn’t really angry. Her mind was on her secret garden, and those green shoots. It would be so much easier if she didn’t have to do everything with her hands. The gardeners had tools. “Could I have a spade, Martta? And a pair of gloves? And pruning shears?”

Martta gave her a startled smile. “Does tha want to help the gardeners? They’d loan tha what tha needs. Just ask.”

Meri hadn’t thought of that. Slowly, thinking it through, she said, “I wanted to make my own garden. Not near theirs. A little place for myself, in the bamboo.”

“Aye, tha can have that.” Martta patted her own chest, a quick flick of the fingers that seemed to mean something. Catching Meri’s puzzled look, she said, “Touch my heart. It means I be happy for tha. I’ll get tha thy gardening tools, small-small for thy small-small hands.”

A few days later, on her way to the secret garden, Meri heard a strange sound cut through the hum of the engines. She still didn’t think the Missiles Wait hum was like a song, though she’d gotten somewhat used to it by now. But this new sound _was_ a song: a wordless, piping, rippling sound, like flowing water made into music. 

She headed toward it, placing her feet softly so as not to interrupt it, and came upon a boy sitting cross-legged on the moss, holding a small piece of bamboo pierced with holes to his lips. The song was coming from that. Three sparrows and a magpie hovered above his head, their wings lazily beating, their heads cocked as if listening. Even more astonishingly, a small furred mammal was perched on his knee. Meri identified it by its long ears. It was a rabbit. A live rabbit. 

The boy removed the bamboo from his mouth, stopping the song. Very softly, he said, “Don’t move.”

Meri held herself still, watching. The boy set his mouth to the bamboo again, and the song resumed. A robin—Meri thought it was _her_ robin—flew up and perched on a bamboo closer to her than to him. Another rabbit came out of the bamboo, moving with a funny hopping gait, and stopped near the boy.

He was Yorkson born, tall and lanky and sharp-boned. His long, big-knuckled fingers moved over the holes in the bamboo so gracefully that it made Meri feel as if she was watching him dance, though the rest of his body was very still. His knees stuck out through holes in his pants. He had a wide mouth, sharp cheekbones, skin the color of the brown earth the bamboo thrived in, and a cap of tightly curled hair the black of garden soil. 

He finished his song, laid down the bamboo, and said, “That be all. Run along.”

The rabbits hopped away, their short white tails bobbing. The magpies flew off, while the sparrows circled and dived, then fluttered away. The robin stayed where it was, watching him with its bright black eyes like polished stones.

“How did you do that?” Meri asked. 

“I be gentle with them,” replied the boy. “I move slow, I sit still, I speak soft. But tha knows that already. Tha’s tamed the robin.” 

“I have?” Meri asked, wondering, then saw how close it was—how close it still was, even with them speaking in normal voices. “I have!”

The robin floated down, pecked up something on the ground, then flew off toward the secret garden.

“I be Dikkon,” said the boy. “Tha must be Meri.”

She thought of him moving slow and speaking soft, and for the first time in her life, she wanted to be gentle with someone. Hesitantly, hoping he wouldn’t laugh at her, she said, “I be Meri.”

He didn’t laugh, but he did smile a wide and generous smile. “Ah, tha’s learning Yorkson!” 

“Dikkon,” Meri said, remembering the name. “You’re—tha’rt Martta’s brother.”

“Aye. She called me, said tha wanted garden tools to fit thy small-small hands. I have them.” He held up a knapsack to her. “I got tha some other things too, I thought tha might want.”

“What?”

“Seeds. Bulbs. If tha wants to farm, tha can get bamboo and tubers and all manner of vegetable seedlings right here. But if tha wants flowers, tha must order them special.” Dikkon grinned. “Or get them as a welcome gift from thy neighbors. Them what I brought all be from the Sower garden.” 

Puzzled, Meri said, “Lots of the plants here have flowers.” 

“Oh, aye, they _have_ flowers. But they be not _for_ flowers. These I brought be for nothing but pretty.” Seeing that she still didn’t quite understand, Dikkon said, “Plant them and see. Where be thy garden?”

Meri hesitated. She’d had no intention of telling anyone about her secret garden. It was forbidden. If anyone found out, they’d re-key the lock and she’d never get in again. But when she imagined Dikkon in her garden, Dikkon who brought welcome gifts for a girl he'd never met and sang for sparrows with a bamboo rod, she suddenly wanted to do the one thing she’d never wanted to do before. She wanted to share something.

“Can you keep a secret?” Meri asked, then corrected herself. “Can tha keep a secret?”

“Aye,” said Dikkon. “I keep the secrets of all the birds and animals in Missiles Wait.”

She took him to the secret garden. He watched in surprise as she opened the lock. “I tried it a few times. It never worked.”

“I don’t know why it works for me,” she said, and led him inside.

He looked around in wonder at the garden. “It be a Yorkson garden. I hadn’t realized.”

“What other sort of garden could it be?”

“Earther but Yorkson-adapted,” he said. “Like all the other gardens around here. But these all be Yorkson plants. They’re engineered here, for here—this is their home.”

“But do you like it?” Meri had to ask. It felt very important that he did.

“I do,” he said. “It be beautiful. So secret and still. It be a good place for birds to nest, were there insects and berries and seeds for them to eat.”

She showed him where she’d cleared space for the shoots to grow, and glowed inside when he told her he couldn’t have done better himself. 

“But even if we planted everywhere, most of the garden would still be dead,” she said disconsolately.

Dikkon examined the nearest dead thing, a spiral of reddish-brown vines growing up the wall. He prodded it, then broke off a twig. It snapped, showing a white interior, and he dropped it. Then he tried to break another. That one bent. He scraped it gently with his fingernail, making a line of brilliant scarlet. “That one’s wick.”

“Wick?” Meri asked, peering at the scarlet scratch. “Why’s this part red inside, and the other white?”

“Wick be Yorkson for alive,” said Dikkon. “And this be red because it be wick. White and brittle or brown and brittle be dead wood. We touch it, we find it, we clip it off, and we leave just the wick parts.” 

Meri looked around the garden. It seemed transformed already in her eyes. The bleakness was only deprivation, not death, just as her hair had looked dull before she’d learned to make it shine. Every bit of brown and gray she saw might only be a cover for brilliant life beneath.

They went around together, Meri using her little clippers and Dikkon his strong hands, snipping and breaking off twigs until they found ones that bent rather than snapping. He insisted on ruthlessly trimming back the purplish vines around the control panel, saying it wasn’t safe to let that be covered, but there was plenty of vine left and all of it was a light purple-green inside. 

When Meri’s stomach rumbled, she realized that it was lunch time and they’d been there for hours. But one patch of the garden was now completely wick. 

Meri and Dikkon worked on the garden for many days, clearing out what was dead, tending to what was alive, and planting new seeds and bulbs. The robin often visited, perching on the wall and watching them as if it was supervising their work. It apparently approved, because it—now she—began to build a nest in one of the trees Dikkon had used a hatchet to prune before finally getting down to the wick part.

The shoots and vines and bushes and trees began to put forth leaves and tendrils and buds, and their dull colors brightened. The vines, particularly, grew so fast that if Meri sat still for long enough, she could sometimes watch a tendril slowly corkscrewing until it found something to twine around. Insects and birds found the garden; creatures that could get in from above. The butterflies were a whirl of color and the Yorkson floaters were prismatic and pretty. But there were no flowers. Buds appeared and got bigger and changed their shape, but they never seemed to blossom. 

“Wait,” said Dikkon, smiling. So Meri waited; not patiently, but she waited.

One day they entered the garden to find it transformed overnight. The scarlet vine, its tendrils now a brilliant red and its arrow-shaped leaves deep green, had burst into blossom. Its buds had all opened into funnel-shaped flowers of a delicate pale gold. The purple vine too had bloomed, with flowers of the same shape but bright blue. So had the blue vine, with flowers streaked in red and white. The garden had become a riot of color, bright and varied as the butterflies that drank from the flowers.

Dikkon laughed at her delight, and said, “Wait.”

This time she waited with eager anticipation, not frustration. She was rewarded when the first shoots she’d tended to, which had put out butterfly-shaped leaves and small conical buds, opened up pure white flowers with five petals and scarlet hearts. The bees loved those, and the cascade of orange flowers from a tree that bent with their weight. Floaters drifted in a cloud around the silken-petaled hexagons Dikkon had planted along a winding path, saying, “These be luminous in the dark.”

Even before the flowers bloomed, Martta had taken to giving Meri bigger portions at her meals. The clothes she’d come with were all too tight now, and Martta gave her new ones in the bright colors she requested, woven of sturdy Yorkson cotlin. Meri now tended to linger in front of mirrors, admiring her own reflection. Not only was she visibly strong, but she was growing out her hair into a puff like Martta’s. Not as big as Martta’s, though. She meant to keep it conveniently spacesuit-sized, just in case.

The engine noise no longer bothered Meri, and she slept soundly. Until the night when the engines faded to a whisper, and she woke to the sound of someone crying. She sat up, rubbing her eyes. It was dark, but she could hear the sound distinctly. As far as she knew, only she and Martta actually lived in Missiles Wait Manor; the gardeners all had homes elsewhere and came by hovercar. But it didn’t sound like a woman crying.

Puzzled, Meri got up, put her slippers on, and left her room. She followed the sound of the crying through dark and chilly corridors, her feet padding along the lightstrips, until she came to a closed door in a part of the house she’d never been to before. Meri opened the door.

A nightlight had been turned to maximum, casting a soft golden light across a room bigger and fancier than her own. A boy her own age lay in a big bed with a wooden frame, sobbing as if his heart was broken. 

Meri looked at him curiously. His face was buried in the pillows so most of what she could see was fine, straight black hair. But she could see enough of his body to know that he didn’t have the Yorkson look. He wore pajama bottoms, but no top, and was covered in an odd, crumpled, translucent blanket. He seemed thin and his skin was ashy, so maybe he was sick and the blanket was a special one to keep him extra warm.

He let out an extra-loud, snorting sob, and Meri said, “Why are you crying?”

The boy let out a strangled yelp, halfway to choking, and sat bolt upright. What Meri had thought was a blanket flared out around him. It was a pair of wings.

They were huge, longer than he was tall, with taut skin so translucent that she could see their bony structure. The skin caught the golden light and seemed to glow.

The winged boy stared at her, gasping, eyes wide with panic. The wings fluttered, then folded themselves over his back. Despite their immense size when spread, they fit neatly to his body. He grabbed a blanket and flung it around his shoulders, covering them up, then once again burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” Meri asked again.

“Because I’m a hideous mutant monster! Because anyone who sees me will hate me and be afraid of me and try to kill me, so I have to stay locked up forever and ever. I wish I was dead!”

“I don’t—” Meri began, but the boy sobbed again, drowning her out. She raised her voice. “I don’t—”

The boy let out a wail, and again her words were lost.

Annoyed, Meri marched to the bed and grabbed his shoulder. Putting her face close to his, she said, “You stop that, right this minute!”

The boy gave a startled gulp, then stopped. Glaring, he said, “You asked.”

“Yes, and you howled so loud I couldn’t say a thing.”

He looked offended. “I don’t _howl_.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t!” But at least he didn’t look inclined to howl again. His face was drawn into a rather familiar scowl. It was one that Meri had often seen in mirrors, though not recently.

“Don’t you want to know what I was trying to say?”

His scowl deepened. “No.”

Meri scowled right back. “Well, I’ll say it anyway. I don’t hate you, I’m not scared of you, and I’m not going to try to kill you.”

“You couldn’t anyway,” he muttered. “You’re too small.”

“Yes, I could,” Meri snapped, even though she knew that all she could really do was hit him or wrestle him. “I might be small, but I bet I’m stronger than you. Anyway, did you even hear me? You’re wrong! Not everyone who sees you hates you and is scared of you and wants to kill you.”

Meri saw that sink in. Then, a little doubtfully, he said, “I’m still a hideous mutant monster.”

“I don’t think you’re hideous.”

“Yes, because you can’t see my hideous wings!”

Meri rolled her eyes. “I saw them already, remember? They’re not hideous. They’re pretty.”

Apparently this shocked him so much that he couldn’t even think of a reply. At last, he said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m Meri La Nix. I’m from Mars. My parents died in a decompression accident, so I came here to live with my aunt, Archana Kerien. That is, she’s my aunt by marriage. My gene-aunt was her wife, Lilit. Lilit La Nix, I guess.”

“I’m Khalin Kerien, Archana and Lilit’s son.” When he said that, Meri could see that his big brown eyes were like hers and like her mother’s, though his hair was straight and his skin was lighter. “I guess that makes us cousins.”

Meri liked the idea of having a cousin, even if she wouldn’t necessarily have picked this crying boy who didn’t pay attention to anything you said until you made him. Still. He did have wings. 

“I think you’re silly to cry over having wings,” Meri said. “I wish I had wings. I don’t think anyone would care. And I could fly.”

“People _would_ care,” Khalin snapped. “You just don’t because you’re weird. And you _wouldn’t_ be able to fly, because I can’t!”

“Oh.” Meri thought of her robin or Dikkon’s magpies, unable to use their wings to fly. It made her feel like crying. “I’m sorry.”

“See?” Khalin said, with an odd note of triumph in his voice. “Now you get it.”

“Why do you have wings at all?”

Gloomily, he said, “Lilit-mom wanted me to be perfectly adapted to Yorkson, so she genetically engineered me this way. It was illegal, experimental technology. It wasn’t safe. She died having me, so basically I killed her. And my wings don’t even work. They don’t do anything but make me a hideous mutant monster.”

“If you were genetically engineered, you’re not a mutant,” Meri pointed out. “And they’re not hideous. They’re beautiful, like a butterfly.”

“They’re actually based on a bat’s wings.”

“Well, whatever they’re based on, they’re the nicest-looking thing about you. Why don’t you moisturize your skin? It looks awful.”

Khalin glared. “Because I don’t like people poking and prodding at me, that’s why.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself, then?”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t! I just think it’s silly of you to hide in your room when right outside, there’s the most beautiful—” Meri shut her mouth so fast, her teeth clicked together. She’d almost said, “The most beautiful garden in the solar system.” 

For the first time, Khalin didn’t look sulky or angry or self-pitying. He just looked curious. “The most beautiful what?”

“It’s beautiful outside,” Meri said.

Khalin shrugged. “I can see outside from my window. I guess it’s nice if you like bamboo and turnips.”

Part of Meri wanted to tell him about the secret garden, just to force him to agree that she was right and he should stop sulking in his room. But the other part of her wasn’t sure she trusted him to keep it a secret. And it wasn’t just her garden, it was Dikkon’s. She couldn’t tell anyone about it without asking him first.

“It’s nicer when you’re actually in it,” Meri said. A sudden yawn nearly dislocated her jaw. “I have to get back to sleep.”

“Meri?” Khalin asked. The blanket around his shoulders had slipped a little, and she could see the tops of his wings quivering. “Would you come see me again?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

The next day, she told Dikkon about Khalin, and was surprised to find that Dikkon knew about him already. “Oh, aye. Martta cares for him. I’ve never met him. They say his wings be too weak to lift him.”

“Why doesn’t Martta take him outside?”

“Martta says Dr. Kerien and Khalin be afraid that folks will be afraid of him, or laugh at him, or hate him.” Dikkon shrugged. “Folks would stare, no doubt. But only the first time. Then they’d get used to it. But Martta says Khalin pitches a fit whenever she tries to get him to go out or have anyone else come visit him, except her and Dr. Kerien and his doctor.”

“He asked me to visit him.”

“Aye.” Dikkon took out his bamboo flute and played a rippling series of notes. He’d told her it helped him think. Then he put it away and said, “If tha trusts him, I’ll trust you.”

Meri thought about it, then said, “I’ll bring him a flower.”

She ended up doing better than that. She dug up one of the plants with hexagonal flowers, the ones Dikkon said were luminescent, put it in a pot, smuggled it into her room, and then smuggled it to Khalin. 

He looked at it with his nightlight on, then turned it off so they could see its pearly glow. He touched the flowers, wonderingly, inhaled its spicy scent, and then did something that endeared himself to Meri: he crumbled a bit of earth between his fingers and sniffed that. 

“Do you like it?” she asked. “The smell of earth.”

“Yes,” he said. 

“Can you keep a secret?”

Unexpectedly, he laughed. “I _am_ a secret!”

Meri laughed too. “Would you like to see where this comes from?”

Khalin swallowed and glanced at the window. “I don’t want people to see me.”

“You don’t mind me seeing you.”

“You’re different.”

“What about a boy?” Meri asked. “A boy who’s different, too.”

Martta was so delighted that Khalin was willing to go outside that she didn’t ask many questions. As soon as Meri explained that he’d agreed to take a walk with her and Dikkon but he didn’t want anyone else to see him, Martta said she’d show Meri a door that opened directly onto the bamboo forest, and from there they could circle around from there to wherever they wanted to go.

Khalin left Missiles Wait Manor bundled up in an enormous black cloak. It billowed and swirled, nearly tripping him up. Between that and his argument with Meri over how noticeable his wings really were when they were folded under clothes and whether the cloak looked ridiculous or cool, he was distracted him from the newness of the outside enough that he arrived at the garden without too much flinching and with no tears at all.

At the door, Dikkon and Khalin looked at each other.

“You look like Martta,” Khalin said.

“Aye, she’s my sister.” 

“I know,” said Khalin. 

“You look like Dr. Kerien,” said Dikkon.

“She’s my mother.”

“I know,” said Dikkon.

Meri laughed and opened the garden door. Both she and Dikkon watched Khalin take in the garden. He walked as if he was in a trance, looking, breathing, smelling. His cloak kept getting snagged on thorns and caught on twigs and trodden into the earth. Finally, his posture very stiff and his eyes fixed on Dikkon, Khalin took it off.

Beneath the cloak, he wore pants and a specially made shirt with snaps in the back to accommodate his wings. They were tightly folded, but it was very obvious what they were.

Dikkon put out his hand, and Khalin flinched back. “Don’t touch them!”

“Thy cloak,” said Dikkon. “I’ll hang it on yonder branch.”

“Oh,” said Khalin in a small voice, and handed Dikkon his cloak.

Meri and Dikkon taught Khalin the names of the plants and showed him how to tend them, Dikkon played his bamboo flute for them both and some birds and squirrels as well, and they all ate the picnic lunch Martta had packed for them. 

Sprawled beneath the shade of a tree draped in star-shaped, sweet-smelling blossoms, Khalin said, “This was Lilit-mom’s garden, wasn’t it?”

“Aye,” said Dikkon.

“I know why Archana-mom locked it up,” said Khalin. “It’s because she loved Lilit-mom so much, she couldn’t bear to see anything that had to do with her. Let alone the thing that killed her.”

Confused, Dikkon said, “Lilit died in childbirth, not in the garden.”

“Dikkon,” said Khalin. “ _I’m_ the thing that killed her.”

“No, you’re not!” Meri snapped. “I wish you’d stop saying that. My parents are dead too, did you know that? They died in a decompression accident while they were out terraforming Mars. And you know why they were out? Because they hated being around me! But you don’t catch me saying I killed them!”

Khalin stared at her, his mouth open, taken aback. “I didn’t know…”

“Tha’rt parents were out terraforming because it be their job, Meri,” Dikkon broke in. “Not because of you.”

“Didn’t other people die in that same accident?” Khalin asked. “They didn’t all die because they were avoiding their kids.”

Meri nodded, blinking hard. She hadn’t realized that she did feel a bit like she’d been responsible for her parents’ deaths until she’d heard herself denying it. But now that she’d said it aloud, she realized that it didn’t make any sense, any more than Khalin’s belief that he’d killed his mother.

“And tha, Khalin, tha didn’t kill thy mother,” said Dikkon.

“She’s the one who decided to genetically engineer you,” said Meri. 

“It wasn’t her fault!” Khalin shouted, then, like Meri, seemed to hear himself. “Well—Archana-mom sure thinks it’s my fault.”

“Then she’s wrong,” said Meri. 

Khalin eyed her. “Do all Martians just say whatever they think?”

“No,” said Meri. Then, after a moment, “Maybe they should.”

The robin swooped down to her nest, a large juicy caterpillar in her beak.

“Look,” said Dikkon softly. “Her eggs have hatched.”

Khalin and Meri and Dikkon spent their days in the secret garden for the next month, weeding and pruning and planting, and also laughing and talking, climbing trees and having picnics, playing the flute and listening to the flute, learning and teaching and simply sitting and breathing it all in. 

Though Khalin never let anyone else see him, he slowly lost his self-consciousness about his wings while he was inside the garden, and occasionally spread them out. It felt good to stretch them, he said. The artificial sun shone through their velvety translucence, lighting them as if from within. Meri and Dikkon thought they were beautiful.

One day when they were chasing each other along the paths, Khalin made a lunge for the much longer-legged Dikkon, who always won the races. His wings snapped out, Khalin jumped, and he glided forward. 

“Got you!” Khalin said, smacking Dikkon between the shoulder blade. He only realized what had happened when his feet touched the ground. “Did I…?”

“Khalin,” Meri said. “Who told you that your wings don’t work?”

“Nobody had to tell me. They don’t. I tried and tried when I was younger, but they just weren’t strong enough or big enough or…” His voice trailed off. Low as a whisper, more to himself than to them, he murmured, “But I’ve grown. _They’ve_ grown.”

He spread them wide, flapped experimentally a few times, and leaped into the air. Meri watched in awe and delight and a little bit of jealousy as Khalin rose above ground, above the fountains, above the walls. He circled and glided, freedom and joy in every movement, until a woman’s voice said, “Khalin?”

Meri spun around. A woman she’d never seen before stood in the open door—the door which Meri _knew_ had auto-locked when she’d closed it. She had straight silky black hair like Khalin’s, but hers was streaked with white. 

“Khalin?” whispered the woman.

“Mom!” Khalin landed with a thump, folded his wings, and rushed into his mother’s arms.

Dikkon and Meri looked at each other, then went to the other end of the garden and concentrated very hard on pruning the indigo grabbers until Khalin and Archana called to them.

Both mother and son’s eyes were wet, but Archana’s voice was steady. “Meri, Dikkon, don’t worry about being in here. I’m not angry. It’s beautiful.”

“The lock opened for me,” said Meri. “I don’t know why.”

“The lock would’ve opened for Khalin, too,” said Archana. “It’s keyed to Lilit and me, but we meant to share it with our children. Our family. So we keyed it for a gene-relative level of DNA matching to either of us. Meri could open it because she’s gene-related to Lilit.”

That explained the lock. But it didn’t explain the robin, without whom Meri wouldn’t have even seen the door. 

_It opened for me because I was meant to find it,_ Meri thought, and that felt as true as anything.

They sat down on a soft, herbal-scented ground cover with tiny, dark green leaves and even tinier yellow flowers, and told Archana everything that had happened while she’d been gone. 

“I’ll be living here in Missiles Wait Manor from now on,” she said at the end of their stories. “I can do almost all my work remotely. I just… It all reminded me too much of my Lilit. This garden. Khalin. But it’s not just her garden. You’ve cared for it. You’ve put in new plants. It’s your garden too now.”

“And Khalin be Khalin,” put in Dikkon.

“Yes,” said Archana. “Khalin be Khalin.”

The gardeners of Missiles Wait Manor had all heard rumors that Dr. Archana Kerien had a child hidden away somewhere, a boy whose genetic problems were so severe that no one could ever visit, let alone touch him without costing him his life. They’d wondered if it was true and felt vaguely sorry for him if it was, but Dr. Kerien’s manner discouraged the asking of non-scientific questions. A few of them, who devoted more thought to the matter than most, felt additionally sorry for the boy (if he was real) because his mother was so rarely present.

That afternoon, as the gardeners were wrapping up a day of weeding and watering and measuring and testing, they heard the sound of laughter and looked up to see a sight that none had ever imagined they’d see. Several gasped and one dropped a turnip on his foot, but none were frightened, none were horrified, and none were filled with hate. All were amazed, several were delighted, and one began to laugh from sheer contagious joy. Martta, who had been waiting for this, watched from a doorway with her eyes stinging.

There, coming through the bamboo forest, were Meri and Dikkon. Meri carried bouquets of brilliantly colored Yorkson flowers, and Dikkon had a crow perched on his shoulder. Dr. Archana Kerien walked with them, an expression of astonished joy on her face. Her head was tilted upward so she could laugh and talk with the boy who could only be her son, a boy with Archana’s hair and Lilit’s eyes, flying low on his beautiful translucent wings.


End file.
